Rocket: DayZ is "two or three hours away from complete disaster at any time"

DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall has been speaking to Edge about the pressures of designing the game and delivering DayZ updates to the vocal community. "It's scary and it's also fun at the same time," he says. "In a way, the project is basically about two or three hours away from complete disaster at any time. Every time we do an update it's just terrifying. And a lot of people get very frustrated when things go wrong."

Hall may describe the process of updating the mod as "terrifying," but he also suggests that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. "There are almost two sides [to the community]," he explains. "There's the side that will just support anything that happens in the project, and then there's the side that's very critical of things that happen but continues playing.

"And I think that's very important, because otherwise it'll lose direction and ego will come into it. For me, the importance is that the right community is involved in it, because if we don't have that then we can't push the experiment of having players create the world."

DayZ has been download half a million times already. Its success has seen Arma 2 rise to the top of the Steam charts in recent weeks. Catch up with the latest mod changes in our DayZ update post , and read our extensive interviews with Dean Hall for more insight into the thinking behind DayZ.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom stopped being a productive human being when he realised that the beige box under his desk could play Alpha Centauri. After Deus Ex and Diablo 2 he realised he was cursed to play amazing PC games forever. He started writing about them for PC Gamer about six years ago, and is now UK web ed.